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Tuesday, March 30, 2004

DOWNLOAD THE LITTLE FELLA: Whatever Prince's worries about how God would view his back catalogue, he's happy to make quite a lot of it available in return for some cold, hard cash. Which he shall probably spend feeding the poor, helping the disadvantaged, and spary painting cows purple. Prince is putting his self-released recent stuff online for download at ninety nine cents a pop, leading to some to figure that that deal he's just made to Sony is his way of sticking it to what we still call round here "The Man." Theory is that he takes a single album to Sony, who invest heavily in promotion of the little funker - in short, paying for his advertising campaign for his own download store. Writing in the Boston Globe, Larry Katz takes this logic a step further:

"Imagine new CDs by Eminem, Norah Jones, Bruce Springsteen and Beyonce made available online at each artist's own website. After all the talk about illegal downloading destroying the music industry, it could be legal downloading that puts the big record companies out of business."